My Daughter-In-Law Edited My Old Dog Out Of The Family Christmas Card And Mailed It To 112 People Because He “Doesn’t Fit The Brand.” Then My 17-Year-Old Grandson Mailed His Own Card To The Same List

I have lived in the same white farmhouse outside Fennimore, Wisconsin, for forty-four years. My late husband, Rollo, and I bought it in 1982 for $61,500, which seemed like a fortune at the time and which we paid off in 2004 with a cake and a bottle of the cheap champagne he liked. The porch sags a little on the east end. The kitchen floor is the original pine. There is a crack in the dining room plaster shaped like the state of Michigan that Rollo always said he would fix and never did, and now I would not let anyone touch it for a thousand dollars.

I live there with Moxie. Moxie is an Airedale terrier, twelve years old this past August, with a tan and black wiry coat that never lies flat no matter how I brush it and a gray beard that he drags through his water bowl and then wipes on my slacks. Rollo picked him out of a litter in Platteville because he was the only puppy who walked straight up to Rollo’s boot and untied the laces.

Rollo died three winters ago. It was his lungs, after a lifetime in the feed mill. In the last few months, when he could not get up the stairs anymore, we set up a hospital bed in the front room, and Moxie slept on the rug beside it every single night. He did not ask to go out. He did not ask to eat. He just lay there with his chin on his paws, watching the bed. When Rollo was gone, Moxie lay on the rug for four more days.

I am seventy-three years old. I tell you all this so you will understand that when people talk about Moxie as if he were a piece of furniture, they are talking about the last living creature in my house who remembers my husband’s voice.

Kenzie and the Brand

My son, Linus, married Kenzie nine years ago. She is a pretty woman, very organized, with a voice that goes up at the end of every sentence like she is asking you a question even when she is telling you something. She and Linus live outside Madison with my grandson, Asher, who is seventeen and taller than his father, and a little girl, Pippa, who is eight.

Kenzie has what she calls a home lifestyle account. I did not know what that meant for a long time. As near as I can tell, she takes photographs of her house, and of tablecloths and throw pillows and pumpkins, and forty-one thousand strangers look at them on their telephones. Companies send her candles and blankets for free, and sometimes they pay her. She calls it her brand. She says the word “aesthetic” a great deal, and also “curated,” and once, at Thanksgiving, she told me my green bean casserole was “giving very 1994,” which I believe was not a compliment.

I do not understand it, but I do not have to understand it. Linus seems happy. Kenzie is good to the children. Whatever else I might say, she is a good mother. I have always tried to keep my opinions in my apron pocket where they belong.

Last fall she called me. She said she had a wonderful idea. She wanted to take the family Christmas card photograph at my farmhouse.

“It’s just so authentic, Marguerite?” she said. “The porch and the old wood floors and the fireplace. People are going to die. It’s like, heritage Christmas?”

I said yes, of course. I was glad, to be honest. It had been a long time since that house was full.

The Day of the Photograph

They came the first Saturday in November. Kenzie arrived two hours before the others with her car full of things. She brought three wreaths. She brought a basket of pinecones she had spray-painted white. She brought plaid blankets and an armload of fake birch logs to put in my real fireplace, because she said my real logs were “too dark on camera.” She moved my rocking chair. She moved Rollo’s old reading lamp. She took down my good quilt from the back of the sofa and folded it into a closet and replaced it with a gray knit throw that still had the tag hanging off it.

I said nothing. It was one afternoon.

Linus came with the children around noon. Asher had his own camera around his neck, a big black one with a long lens. He is taking a photography class at the high school this year and he takes it more seriously than any class I have ever seen him take. He kissed my cheek and then knelt down on the kitchen floor and let Moxie put his whole bearded face in his lap.

“Hey, old man,” he said to the dog. “Hey, Mox.”

Kenzie set up a tripod in the front room. She arranged us in front of the fireplace. Linus and Kenzie in the middle. Pippa in front in a red velvet dress. Asher on the end. Me in my rocking chair, where she had put it, at the side.

Moxie came over and lay down at my feet, the way he always does, with his chin on the toe of my shoe.

Kenzie looked at the screen of her camera. She made a small face.

“Can we maybe, um,” she said. “Can we move the dog?”

“He’s fine where he is,” I said.

“He’s just kind of a lot? Visually?” She laughed. “It’s fine. It’s totally fine. We can fix it in edit.”

I did not know what “fix it in edit” meant. I thought she meant she would brighten him up. I put my hand down on Moxie’s wiry head, and the camera clicked a hundred times, and Pippa giggled, and Linus pretended to be patient. Afterward Kenzie took a few dozen more without Moxie, just to be safe, she said, while Asher held him in the kitchen.

When they left, I put my quilt back on the sofa and my rocking chair back where it goes and Rollo’s lamp back by the window, and I sat down in the quiet with Moxie and felt, for the first time in a while, like a woman with a family.

What Came in the Mail

The card came the second week of December. A heavy cream envelope with my name on it in printed script and a little gold seal on the back. I opened it at the kitchen table with my coffee.

It was a beautiful card. I will say that. The light was golden. The fireplace glowed. Pippa looked like a little doll in her red dress. Linus was smiling. Kenzie had her hand on his chest. Asher looked like he would rather be anywhere else, which is how seventeen-year-old boys look in every photograph ever taken.

And there I was in my rocking chair at the side.

At my feet, where Moxie had been, there was a basket of white pinecones.

I looked at it for a long time. I put on my reading glasses and looked again. It was the photograph with Moxie in it. I could tell, because my hand was resting down by my knee, on nothing, on the air, as if I were patting a ghost. They had kept the photograph where I was petting my dog, and they had taken my dog out of it and put pinecones under my hand.

Moxie was lying under the kitchen table at that very moment with his chin on my foot.

I called Kenzie. I did not plan what to say. I just called.

“Oh my gosh, did you get it?” she said. “Isn’t it gorgeous? People are obsessed.”

“Kenzie,” I said. “Where is Moxie?”

There was a pause on the line. “Oh. Well. We talked about that, remember?”

“We did not talk about it. You said you would fix it.”

“Right, and I did? Marguerite, I’m sorry, but he just doesn’t fit the brand. Old dogs read as kind of sad on camera. People see a gray dog and they think about dogs dying. That’s not the feeling we’re going for at Christmas.”

“He’s not dying,” I said. “He’s under my table.”

“I know, and that’s great. But the card is a whole visual story. It’s not personal.”

I asked her how many she had sent.

“A hundred and twelve,” she said. She sounded proud. “I used your address book for your side, so your church friends got one, and Rollo’s army friends, and your sister. I knew you’d want everyone to have it.”

A Hundred and Twelve Envelopes

I want to be honest about what hurt. It was not the pinecones, though the pinecones were bad enough. It was that she had borrowed my little blue address book in November, saying she wanted to help me with my Christmas list, and she had used it to mail my own people a picture of me reaching down to touch a dog that was no longer there.

Vida Sundquist from church got one. My sister Delphia in Eau Claire got one. Bat Quill got one, down in Arkansas. Bat served with Rollo in 1970 and 1971 and has called me every year on Rollo’s birthday since the funeral. Bat had a dog in his unit over there, a scout dog, and he and Rollo used to talk about that dog for hours at our kitchen table. He was the one who told Rollo, when Moxie was a puppy, that he had picked a good one.

All of them, opening that cream envelope. All of them looking at my empty hand.

I called Linus that night. I told him what Kenzie had said. I waited for him to say something.

“Mom,” he said finally. “It’s just a card.”

“Then why couldn’t the dog be in it?”

“It’s her business. She knows what works. I’m not going to get in the middle of it.”

“You’re already in the middle of it,” I said. “You’re in the middle of the picture.”

He sighed the way his father used to sigh when I was right and he did not want me to be. He said he would talk to her. I knew he would not. Linus has never liked the middle of anything. He takes after Rollo in most ways, but not that one. Rollo would have stood in the middle of a highway if he thought someone he loved was being treated unfairly.

I put the card face down in a kitchen drawer and went to bed. Moxie climbed up the stairs one at a time behind me, slow on his old hips, and lay down on the rug beside the bed, the same way he used to lie beside Rollo’s.

Asher in the Kitchen

I did not know Asher had heard about any of it. I did not think he paid attention to anything that was not on a screen. That was my mistake, and I have apologized to him for it since.

He drove up by himself the following Saturday in his father’s old pickup. He brought a box of glazed donuts from the gas station, which is the way to my heart and he knows it. He sat down at my kitchen table and Moxie put his head in his lap again, and Asher said, “Grandma, did you get the card?”

I said I had.

“Did you see what she did?”

I said I had.

He was quiet for a minute, scratching Moxie behind the ears. Then he said, “I took pictures that day too. Mom didn’t ask to see them.” He took out his phone and slid it across the table to me.

The first photograph was of me in my rocking chair, laughing at something Pippa had said, with my head tipped back and my hand down on Moxie’s head, and Moxie looking up at me with his beard full of fireplace light. The second one was of Moxie lying alone on the rug in front of the fireplace, after the rest of us had gone into the kitchen, looking at Rollo’s reading lamp in the window. The third was of Moxie and Asher on the kitchen floor, nose to nose, both of them with their eyes closed.

I could not say anything for a while.

“These are better than hers,” I said finally.

“I know,” he said, without any modesty at all, and I loved him for it.

Then he told me what he had done.

The Other Card

When Kenzie had been getting the cards ready in early December, she had made Asher stuff and stamp the envelopes for twenty dollars. She had emailed him the address list as a spreadsheet so he could check the labels. A hundred and twelve names. My side and her side, all of them.

He still had it.

He had taken the photograph of me laughing with Moxie, and he had gone to the pharmacy photo counter in town, and he had printed a hundred and twelve copies on card stock with his own money from bagging groceries at the supermarket on weekends. It cost him $96.32. He had bought a hundred and twelve plain red envelopes and a roll of stamps. And on the back of every single card he had written, by hand, in his terrible seventeen-year-old printing, the same short note.

“I think the card you got from our family was missing somebody. This is Moxie. He’s twelve. He was my grandpa’s dog and now he’s my grandma’s dog and he is part of this family. Merry Christmas. Love, Asher.”

“You did all hundred and twelve by hand?” I said.

“It took four nights,” he said. “My hand still hurts.”

“When are you going to mail them?”

He looked at me with Rollo’s exact expression, the one that meant somebody was about to have a very interesting week.

“I mailed them Thursday,” he said.

The Phone Starts Ringing

The first call came Monday morning at eight. It was my sister Delphia. She did not even say hello. She said, “Mags, I got a card from Asher, and I have to tell you, I cried in my car outside the post office.”

Vida Sundquist called at nine. She said the women’s circle at church had passed Asher’s card around after Bible study and every one of them had something to say about it, and not all of it was Christian.

At ten-thirty my phone rang with a number from Arkansas. It was Bat Quill. He is eighty years old now and his voice shakes, but it did not shake that morning.

“Marguerite,” he said. “I got two cards from your family this year. I threw the first one in the trash. The second one is on my refrigerator.”

Then he told me he was mailing me something.

After that, the cards started coming back. Not Christmas cards, exactly. Letters. Photographs. People on that list began mailing me pictures of their own old dogs. A gray Labrador on a porch in Iowa. A one-eyed beagle in a sweater. A shepherd mix so old she was mostly white, lying on a hospital blanket next to a recliner. One woman I had not heard from since high school sent a picture of a collie she had in 1968 with a note that said, “Thank your grandson for reminding me.” By New Year’s I had forty-one letters on my kitchen table. Moxie slept under it like he was guarding them.

Bat’s envelope came on December 23rd. Inside was a black-and-white photograph I had never seen. It was Rollo at twenty, skinny as a rail in his fatigues, sitting on an ammunition crate with a big wiry-haired scout dog leaning against his knees. On the back, in faded pencil, it said, “Tuttle and Rebel, 1971. He said someday he’d get one just like him.”

I had never known. Forty years of marriage and he never told me why it had to be an Airedale. Or maybe he told me once and I wasn’t listening. Either way, I sat at my kitchen table with that photograph and cried harder than I had at the funeral.

Christmas at the Farmhouse

Kenzie found out about Asher’s card the way you might expect. Her own mother received one and called to ask her why she had cut the dog out. Kenzie called Asher. Then she called Linus. Then, on the 22nd, she called me.

I expected her to be angry. She was, a little. But mostly she sounded embarrassed, which I understand is a feeling people in her line of work do not get to have very often.

“Somebody posted his card online,” she said. “One of the ladies from your church, I think. It’s been shared, like, eleven thousand times. People found my account. They’re leaving comments about the pinecones.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said, and I mostly meant it. Nobody deserves to be mocked by strangers. “But you did put pinecones where my dog was.”

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, in a voice that did not go up at the end for once, “I know. That was bad. I’m sorry, Marguerite.”

They came for Christmas dinner. All of them. Linus carried in the ham, and Pippa carried in a plate of cookies shaped vaguely like stars, and Asher came in last with his camera around his neck. Kenzie came in carrying a small box. She handed it to me in the front hall without saying much.

Inside was a new collar for Moxie. Red leather, with a little brass tag. On the tag it said MOXIE, and under that, TUTTLE FAMILY.

I put it on him right there in the hall. He did not care about the collar in the slightest. He cared that Pippa had cookies.

At dinner, before we ate, Linus cleared his throat. My son does not give speeches. He did not give one that night either. But he looked across the table at his own boy and said, “Asher was right. I should have been the one to say something, and I didn’t. I’m sorry, Mom.” Then he looked down at his plate, and his ears went red the way Rollo’s used to, and that was that.

Next Year’s Card

Kenzie asked Asher to take the photograph for next year’s card. He set the tripod up in my front room the first week of November. He did not move my rocking chair. He did not move Rollo’s lamp. He did not bring a single pinecone.

We stood in front of the real fireplace with the real dark logs burning. Moxie lay at my feet with his chin on the toe of my shoe. Asher set the timer and ran around to stand behind me with his hand on my shoulder, and just before the shutter clicked, Moxie sneezed, and every one of us laughed at once.

That is the photograph that went out. A hundred and twelve copies, and Bat Quill, and forty-one new names from the letters on my kitchen table.

It is on my refrigerator now, next to the photograph of Rollo and Rebel on the ammunition crate in 1971. Moxie is slower this winter. He takes the stairs one at a time and rests on the landing. Some nights he does not make it all the way up, and I bring a blanket down and sleep on the sofa so he is not alone. I know what the gray in his beard means. I am not a foolish woman.

But for one more Christmas, he was in the picture where he belonged. And my grandson made sure a hundred and twelve people knew it.

If someone in your family has ever been quietly edited out because they did not look the way somebody wanted, pass this along. Sometimes it only takes one person willing to put them back in the picture, and sometimes that person is seventeen.

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